Chapter Text
The first time it happened, BJ thought he was dreaming. One second he was curled up on his cot in the Swamp, eyes closed, feigning sleep convincingly until he actually fell asleep (much of life at the 4077th was pretending, desperately, until the act became true), and the next he was squinting in the sun at the Kimpo airport, fresh-faced, in uniform, again .
There was dream Hawkeye, looking the same way he had in real life: distracted, irritated, sad. Maybe BJ hadn’t picked up on the sad part back then, just that Hawkeye was looking for someone, and that someone wasn’t BJ.
“Rudyard Kipling,” BJ supplied, when Hawkeye gave him the opening. It was better to play along, he thought, when a dream felt this real. Deviating from the prescribed path could launch his subconscious into a worse memory. This memory wasn’t so bad, and BJ remembered most of the details of his first day in Korea. It was the day he’d met Hawkeye, after all, and who could forget a day like that.
Hawkeye looked at him, and then looked away, and then looked back, amused, surprised, as if he was just now taking in the look of BJ. It would be silly to say that that was when it all began. It would be silly to say that BJ knew, before he even really knew Hawk, that he would be important to him in a way few others were. (Maybe Hawkeye was important in a way nobody else was, but that was a risky thought to entertain, in a dream.)
BJ could feel the nervousness and adrenaline and desire to impress squirming around in his stomach. It was odd. It was like he really was there again. He felt the way he had and he said the things he’d said and when he threw up in the dirt, hot sun beating down, mud soaking through his pants, gunfire sharp overhead, he could taste the bile.
Hawkeye helped him up. His hand was warm and strong. Hawkeye had good hands, good surgeon’s hands. BJ had noticed, even back then. He got a sort of woozy, light-headed feeling again, when Hawkeye’s hands were on him; it was like the past and present were merging, momentarily, though it was a dream. It was as if your own ghost could pass through you.
There was Radar, sipping his grape nehi, while a fight broke out at Rosie’s. There was Hawkeye, calmly relaying the details of life at the 4077th, with his usual Hawkeye embellishments, that BJ hadn’t noticed the first time around but could recognize now: the flashy hand gestures, the quick-witted jokes, the effortless swallowing of frankly heinous booze, that heavy-lidded thing he did with his eyes where they got to look very blue and oddly, very come hither .
“I think I’ve had too much to drink,” BJ muttered, after Hawkeye had doubled over, cackling, at something or other BJ said.
He was a lightweight before he got to Korea, if the startlingly vivid details of the dream were to be believed. He didn’t quite remember it like that, but maybe he’d spent so long pickling his own liver in the Swamp that he’d lost perspective on the number of drinks it took to get reasonable, well-adjusted, men of his approximate build sloshed.
“The 4077th is better with booze tinted glasses,” Hawkeye said, grinning, slurring his words just a little.
BJ remembered that. He remembered Hawk’s hands on his shoulders and then grazing his waist. He remembered the first time he’d heard Hawkeye’s laugh, and how it had shocked him out of the numbness he’d felt all over since he’d boarded the plane. He’d shut something off in his brain when he’d said goodbye to Peg and Erin at the airport. Peg had hugged him tight enough to bruise, her tears making a damp spot on the uniform she’d neatly pressed. Erin had been wailing. BJ’s hearing got a little fuzzy. He squared his shoulders and tucked away his fear. It was sharp in his ribs, tight and compact like a knot, but he’d feel it later. He’d feel it alone, at night, with his hands balled in a blanket, and his mouth pressed to a pillowcase so no one could hear him. Or he wouldn’t feel it at all. He’d do the work and he’d stay out of trouble and he’d save all the extra feeling for home. He’d hold his breath for the duration. He could do it. He had enormous lung capacity.
Or at least he thought he did, until Hawk laughed so loudly and maniacally that he nearly choked on his own sound. Then, all of a sudden BJ felt like all the air was knocked out of him, like the knot in his chest was unraveling, just a little.
“Sirs, uh, Hawkeye, they’re expecting Captain Hunnicutt…we should—”
“Alright, alright, Radar we’re going,” Hawkeye said, rising unsteadily from his seat, grinning again, with his eyes on BJ like he was his new plaything, or at least a distraction from Trapper’s departure.
BJ had been happy to be that, in the beginning. He liked that he was filling a space that needed filling, not just at the unit, but for Hawkeye, whose heels BJ was on like a well‐trained dog. It didn’t yet feel confining to be in Trapper John’s shadow; at first it had been a welcome shield.
The jeep ride was longer and bumpier than BJ remembered. He was leaning sideways, away from Hawkeye, though their boots were brushing together. He got facefuls of dust. He mourned the loss of his hat, and the way a few hours in Korea had already ruined Peg’s handiwork on his uniform. He felt wild and unkempt and dizzy. He tumbled out of the jeep, hearing Hawkeye cackle as BJ sagged sideways into Margaret, and hearing himself laugh too. There was something absurd and distant about listening to his own laugh. It was like time dissolved. He’d laughed differently back then, BJ realized. He didn’t laugh with his full chest before he met Hawkeye. Before Hawkeye, BJ had always been holding something back.
That night, BJ sobered up and showered and unpacked his things. His brain didn’t gloss over the details like it normally did when he was dreaming. He shivered under the cold water in his shower stall. He looked the way he had back then. He was evenly tanned and lean with a healthy color to his cheeks. He wasn’t yet coated in the layer of grime that seemed to settle over everyone who had been at the MASH for long enough to forget what real showers felt like, with proper water pressure and doors that closed and water that didn’t go murky brown or have an off smell that stuck in your nostrils. The grime was all over him now, at his scalp and under his fingernails and in the calloused soles of his feet. He’d spent enough hours in the OR sweating through his shirt, or getting blood crusted in his arm hair, that the grime felt like it would never scrub off completely.
But here, he didn’t have any of his bumps or bruises or scars: the purplish bruising of the toe he’d stubbed on Hawk’s trunk yesterday morning, the nick on his jaw from a blunt razor, the stitches he’d gotten when Frank shot him. It was odd, like he was being remade.
When night fell, and BJ lay down on his cot, there was that same awkward, anticipatory silence. It was the first night he’d slept across from Hawkeye. It was the first night he’d occupied the space that Trapper had left. BJ could hear the sounds of the camp settling, and Frank snoring. His eyes wouldn’t close, so he stared at the top of the tent and listened for Hawkeye’s breathing, and the rustle of sheets when he shifted. It felt so real. It felt like the first time. His heart was pounding the same way. His whole body ached for home. It was a pain that radiated, hot and itchy like a sunburn. He’d forgotten. Mill Valley felt so distant now.
Suddenly he felt panicked and crazy. Dreams weren’t like this. Dreams didn’t rake the hot coals of the past so aggressively. Nostalgia, fantasy, booze tinted glasses were one thing, but this was another.
“It feels so real, Hawk,” BJ mumbled.
“BJ?” Hawkeye said. BJ could see him lift his head. His hair stood up, making a funny shadow on the wall. “Did you say something? Are you dreaming?”
“I can’t tell. This feels just like the day we met,” BJ said.
“The day we— oh ,” Hawkeye’s voice got thin and vulnerable. “Oh, BJ, it’s all going to be okay. Trust me. You know me, don’t you? You know I wouldn’t lie?”
“Yes,” BJ said. He wanted to sit up but he felt rooted to his cot.
“Just close your eyes, and breathe. It feels a little like the drop on a roller coaster. Have you been on a roller coaster?” Hawkeye said.
“What does? What feels like a roller coaster?” BJ said. He bit down on his bottom lip, hard. He felt a little faint, and like some force above him was pushing down.
“Looping back around,” Hawkeye said.
BJ closed his eyes, and it happened just as Hawkeye described.
BJ woke up in the Swamp with a splitting headache. He blinked, and he shifted, and he reached up to scrub a hand over his face. His mustache was there and the crease between his eyebrows and his cut from shaving.
He was so happy to know where he was and to see Hawkeye (as he was, unshaven, hair silvery, drooling on his pillow) that he tucked away the afterimages of the presumed dream and followed Hawk to the mess tent.
And then he forgot about it. It was easy to, when they were swept up into 15 hours straight in the OR, and BJ’s feet hurt too much to think about anything other than bowel resections and making sure he picked every bit of shrapnel out of every kid on his table. And later, after sleeping a couple dream free hours, and later still, at the Officer’s Club, three or four drinks in, he wasn’t quite sure.
“Do you want another one of those? I’m buying,” Hawkeye said, leaning his elbows on the table. He sipped his drink and squinted down at his pitiful solitaire game.
“Aren’t you tired?” BJ said. He’d only come out because Hawk dragged him.
“Don’t you want another drink?” Hawkeye said, smiling goofily, leaning closer into BJ’s space.
BJ considered. “Yes,” he said. “Are you trying to get me drunk, Hawk?”
“I don’t have the time to be tired. There’s never enough time, or maybe too much depending on how you look at it,” Hawkeye said, brain evidently a few paces behind.
BJ frowned. “You’re thinking about Private Jenkins, aren’t you?” he muttered.
The poor kid’s leg was a lost cause by the time he got to the 4077th, but it was Hawkeye, so he couldn’t let it go, and he took it on himself as a personal failing. BJ could see it in the way he was nursing his drink, flipping cards all over the place, and leaning back and forth in his chair, hooking his foot around one of the table’s legs and bumping his knee against BJ’s.
“He’s not going to get a good night’s sleep. Why should I?” Hawkeye said.
BJ braced his hands on the table. He wondered if Hawkeye punished himself like this before the war, or if it was a new development brought on by the inhumanity of their circumstances. There was a pressurized sort of faith everyone had in him to perform in the OR, when the way to proceed was by no means clear. He could imagine a younger Hawkeye, maybe in med school, maybe before, pushing himself to stay up another hour studying something he’d failed. He could imagine him as a child, walking the long way home in the rain because he didn’t want to trouble his father for a ride he didn’t feel he deserved.
BJ had seen Hawkeye break under the lofty standards he had for himself enough times to know the symptomology: sharp crescents of Hawkeye’s nails dug into his palms, sleepless and ruminative nights, the offer of drinks so he had an audience when the drama of his suffering found the proper stage. Tonight the stage was this corner of the Officer’s Club, and the chair Hawkeye was leaning back in, precariously, as BJ rose to get them more drinks.
“I’ll get this round,” he said.
“I offered ,” Hawkeye said, drawing out the syllables.
“You buy me drinks all the time. You don’t need to, you know? I’ll keep you company, regardless,” BJ said.
Hawkeye scoffed, still rocking on the legs of his chair. Something vulnerable flashed across his face, at being read so easily, BJ thought.
“It’s an expensive habit,” Hawkeye said.
“What is?” BJ said.
“Buying your drinks. It didn’t used to be,” Hawkeye said. He tilted forward, looking up at him through dark eyelashes.
BJ crossed his arms. He was grateful, all of a sudden, for the O Club’s noise: the tinny sound of the piano, the thumps and bangs of the pinball machine, the clatter of glasses, and raucous card games.
“What do you mean?” BJ said.
Hawkeye put his hands behind his head, casually, and leaned back some more. BJ was certain, for a second, that he’d fall.
“I mean you used to be a lightweight,” Hawkeye said.
“You remember that?” BJ said. He could taste the dream liquor on the tip of his tongue, sharper, harsher, because he hadn’t quite grown accustomed to it. At home he only had the odd beer. His father drank, and he’d never liked it.
“Yes,” Hawkeye said. “Why wouldn’t I?”
You know me, don’t you? You know I wouldn’t lie?
“Because it was forever ago. It feels like forever ago,” BJ said. He was caught, pulled in one direction by the bar, and in the other by the odd look on Hawk’s face.
“Does it?” Hawkeye said, eyebrows rising.
BJ had been making the usual joke, about how time stretched and sagged and tangled at the 4077th, about how they’d been doing the same thing for an eternity now, with no end in sight. But, Hawkeye was looking at him as if BJ had grown another head.
“I’m getting the drinks,” BJ managed. Hawkeye nodded at him and BJ turned to the bar.
When he returned, BJ set down the glasses and reached for the back of Hawkeye’s chair, to steady him so he didn’t knock himself over.
He scooped up the drink BJ had set in front of him and took a long sip. BJ watched the bob of his Adam’s apple.
He smiled, wide, blue eyes glazed and fond, and tipped his glass in BJ’s direction. “Thank you, by the way,” he said. “You’re sweet.”
BJ felt a little flushed, the way he always did when Hawkeye got a touch too drunk, and consequently complimentary.
“I buy you drinks all the time,” BJ said.
Hawkeye hummed. “Yes, but tonight you have impeccable timing,” he said.
“Timing,” BJ repeated. He took a sip of his own drink.
Hawkeye splayed his hands out over the forgotten solitaire game. He pushed the cards together in a big pile and then scooped them up, tapping the cards’ edges until they came together in a neat stack.
“I’m just lucky you took pity on me the day we met. I’m grateful it was you who came to get me, not Radar all by his lonesome, or…I don’t know, Frank,” BJ said.
It was an abridged version of the story, one that omitted Trapper. BJ was lucky that Hawkeye had been the one to meet him. He thought of dream Hawkeye’s warmth and his hands on BJ’s forehead and back. He thought of Hawk’s exaggerated performance of himself, and of a normalcy that had been demolished moments before BJ’s plane had touched the ground.
“Pity’s the wrong word,” Hawkeye said, brow furrowing.
BJ laughed. “What’s the right word, Hawk?” he said.
He shook his head, aggressively. “I don’t know. But not pity,” he said.
BJ snorted. He sat back in his chair and tried to match the quick pace at which Hawkeye was finishing his drink.
“Do you ever wish you could go back in time?” Hawkeye said. He hunched forward so he and BJ were nearly nose to nose.
A strange feeling prickled up the back of his neck.
“There was nothing else you could do for Jenkins,” BJ said.
“I know, Beej. I know,” Hawk said, unconvincingly. “That’s not why I’m asking.”
“Why are you asking?” BJ said.
“You didn’t even answer the question,” Hawkeye said.
Hawk narrowed his eyes at him and BJ bristled. Usually he could get away with all manner of evasive, conversational maneuvers. That day, in the dream, he’d been all smiles and nods and jokes he thought Hawkeye might like. He’d been determined to keep his head down, or at the very least attach himself to someone who knew how to avoid getting killed. He’d picked Hawkeye with very little evidence. He hadn’t had much of a choice, he thought. The second Hawkeye had put out his hand and pulled him up, it was all over. BJ could only bluff for so long.
“I don’t see the point in entertaining a hypothetical like that,” BJ said.
Hawkeye barked out a laugh. “I thought you had an imagination,” he said.
“I’m using it all to pretend the stuff they serve in the mess is edible,” BJ said.
“Do you want to hear my answer?” Hawkeye said.
BJ rolled his eyes. “I have a feeling you want to tell me,” he said.
“I do. I wish I could go back and save people and fix messes and say smarter things. I’d stop the war, you know? If I could go back in time I’d find a way,” he said.
“Lofty aspirations,” BJ said.
Hawkeye shrugged. “Part of me thinks I’d just make everything worse,” he said. “I’d get my grubby little fingerprints all over the past. Hell, maybe some fluids. It’s a risky business, I imagine.”
“Hmm,” BJ said. He was having trouble imagining Hawkeye making the past worse.
“I suppose you’d rather go forward,” Hawkeye said.
He pushed his hair out of his face and BJ watched the motion. He’d cataloged the changes in Hawkeye too, since the day they’d met. The dream had wormed its way back into BJ’s brain. Hawkeye had looked younger. It was hard to tell now. The changes were so gradual that he wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.
He would rather go forward, and so would Hawkeye, no matter what he said.
“You know I had the strangest dream last night,” BJ said.
“What about?” Hawkeye said, eyelids heavy, smile lascivious.
BJ’s nose wrinkled. “Not like that. It was about going back, doing it over, like you said, ” he said, voice hushed. The feeling was spreading. He had goosebumps all over.
“Tell me about it,” Hawkeye said.
“Well it was…it was like my first day in Korea,” BJ said, stumbling over his words.
“All fun and games?” Hawkeye said.
“Beat for beat, Hawk. It was eerie, and it felt like I was actually there. Everything up until the end. We were going to bed and I said something about how real the dream felt. It was one of those lucid moments, I guess. And then you…you said something about how it was like uh, well, like a—”
“Like a drop on a roller coaster,” Hawkeye said.
BJ wondered if perhaps it was all happening again. Maybe he was dreaming. Maybe he’d never woken up.
“Have I told you this story already?” BJ said.
“No,” Hawkeye said. He met his eyes, seriously. “But that’s what I said, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” BJ said.
Hawkeye pulled a little notebook out of his pocket while BJ stared at him, slack jawed.
“I-I-I—wrote it down, see? The day you said it, in case you didn’t remember. I wasn’t sure when days would start to loop back around for you. It took a while before it started happening to me. It was around the time that Tommy Gillis died on my operating table,” Hawkeye said. His gaze was intense. BJ’s head was spinning.
“Is this some sort of prank?” BJ said, blushing shamefully.
Hawkeye flipped through the pages of the notebook in his hands and then passed it to BJ. It was dated the day he’d arrived at the MASH:
BJ thinks he’s dreaming. Got kicked back to his first day. I talked him through it. Told him it feels like a drop on a roller coaster. I don’t know if it’s just wishful thinking, or if I said the right thing. I’m sure he won’t remember tomorrow, but if and when he does I think I ought to have some sort of record. It’s strange, knowing that all day he thought he was dreaming, and that to him we weren’t strangers.
“I’m not sure I understand,” BJ said.
Hawkeye chewed on his lip. “Welcome to the club,” he said.
The details came out in pieces. Hawkeye led him back to the Swamp, poured him a drink from the still, and then sat down across from him, knee to knee, to outline what was clear.
“People already think I’m crazy,” Hawkeye said, in a way that made BJ vaguely nauseous. “So I’d never say anything if you didn’t first. But you had the strangest look on your face when you woke up this morning. I looked over and it seemed like you had a truly egregious hangover despite not drinking a thing last night, and I thought , well really I hoped that it had started happening to you too, and that you remembered.”
“What exactly is happening?” BJ said, under his breath. Hawkeye was usually a pace or two ahead of him, but now it seemed like he was speaking in code.
“I’m trying to be discreet, Beej,” Hawkeye said, as if reading BJ’s thoughts.
“Well, I feel like my brain’s been turned to powdered eggs,” BJ said.
He leaned his elbows on his knees and put his face in his hands. His headache was coming back, pulsing through his temples and making his vision go blurry at the edges. It was like jet lag and a hangover and an ear infection all merged into some confusing cocktail of human suffering. Hawkeye put his hand on BJ’s back, between his shoulder blades, and rubbed in slow circles.
“The week after Tommy died I had a dream where I was back in the day he came to camp the first time. It wasn’t like any other dream I’ve had. There weren’t any nonsensical tangents or flights of fantasy. It was just that day , exactly as it had been the first time. And I saw him and I tried to warn him, Beej. I said I knew something bad was going to happen. I said that I’d seen it and that he had to listen to me now because I wouldn’t be able to save him later,” Hawkeye said. He drew in a slow, shaky breath.
“What happened?” BJ said, eyes closed, pinching the bridge of his nose to try to get the pain to recede.
“Nobody was listening. I got worked up, because it felt so real. Trap and Henry got concerned, so they stuck me in a bed in post op and sedated me. I woke up in the Swamp. It was the same day all over again. It happened six more times before I gave up and played along. As soon as I did, I woke up where I was supposed to be…in a manner of speaking. Which is to say, the Swamp a week after Tommy died,” Hawkeye said.
“So what? So, an exceedingly long and strange dream,” BJ said. He lifted his head, fractionally, and blinked at Hawkeye.
Hawkeye was quiet for a beat.
“You feel really rough, don’t you?” he said.
“Like someone beat my head in,” BJ said.
“And you think that’s what? Symptomatic of a bad nightmare?” Hawkeye said.
“It’s not less plausible than whatever it is you’re trying to tell me,” BJ said.
“Would you listen to me?” Hawkeye said. He pushed his journal into BJ’s hands. “I’ve been making notes. It’s all very scientific, Beej. I’m a man of science.”
“It sounds like you’re a man of pseudoscience, Hawk,” BJ said.
Hawkeye reached out and took BJ by both wrists. His grip was tight.
“Look, I’ve waited a long time for this. I thought maybe it was some desperate bit of imagination.. I thought it was exhaustion or stress and that whole theory worked for a while until it didn’t. Half the time I hardly know what year it is,” Hawkeye said. “You’ve gotta listen to me.”
He hadn’t let go. He was holding on like he expected BJ to twist out of his grasp.
“I’m listening,” BJ said.
Hawkeye’s grip relaxed, fractionally.
“You remember last month we were going to get leave together but then we got that wave of wounded and they couldn’t spare us?” Hawkeye said.
“I remember,” BJ said.
“Well I went back to that day ten times, and it happened just like that every time but the last. The last time I kept waiting for the choppers. I was all dressed and ready, you know? I hardly bothered packing because I’d been through the whole thing so many times that I was getting sick of it. Like physically sick, Beej, being stuck in a loop does that. I could hardly keep food down. I got so nauseous. And then the choppers didn’t come. And you got so pissed at me for not packing, but you still dragged me to the jeep and took me to Tokyo,” Hawkeye said.
“I don’t remember…we never…I—”
“I needed to see if I could take something back,” Hawkeye said. He released BJ’s wrists and jumped up. He crossed the room to his trunk and rummaged in it, briefly, before producing a strip of photos. “So I made you take these with me.”
Hawkeye handed the photos over. There they were, sure enough, sitting side by side in a Tokyo photo booth. BJ was smiling wide, and Hawkeye was leaning against him, looking world weary and green. He looked at the back. The date matched Hawkeye’s story, and was written in BJ’s handwriting. He traced the smudging ink lines. It was unmistakable.
“And you’re sure I wasn’t drunk? You weren’t drunk? We could’ve blacked out a whole day,” BJ said.
“Usually the past doesn’t diverge like that. It’s like you said. Every beat of the day we met was the same, until the end,” Hawkeye said.
BJ looked up from the photos. He looked like himself, hair a little wild, smile soft and fond, looking at Hawkeye the way he always looked at him. He racked his brain for some thread of memory. He and Hawkeye hadn’t gone to Tokyo. They’d been swept up into triage. He remembered the disappointment of unpacking his bag: all the fresh laundry gone to waste, the money he’d tucked away for souvenirs, the aching longing for a clean, soft bed at the end of the night, and Hawkeye, he’d been excited to be somewhere else with Hawkeye. He collected memories of them in places that weren’t the 4077th like they were rare coins. He would’ve remembered going to Tokyo with Hawkeye.
“And when you woke up…” BJ said. His mouth had gone very dry.
“I was back in the present,” Hawkeye said, grinning wildly. “I taped the photos to my chest. I wasn’t taking any chances.”
BJ traced the frayed edges of the photos. He wondered how many times Hawk had looked at them. There was a crease down the middle, after the third photo. He imagined Hawkeye clutching his chest in the morning, making sure they were still there. He imagined the photos warmed from his frantic body heat.
“This is about as scientific as I can get, Beej,” Hawkeye said. And BJ could see the exhaustion overtake his whole form. He set the photos down on the table between them and sat up straight.
“Are we the only ones?” BJ said.
“As far as I know,” Hawkeye said. “Though my memory’s a little spotty.”
Hawkeye stood. He leaned over and put his hands on BJ’s shoulders. He squeezed in a way that immediately relieved the tension that had built up in BJ’s muscles. BJ melted into the touch.
“Don’t,” he muttered, heated, and overwhelmed. Hawkeye released him, and BJ missed the contact immediately.
“Get some sleep. I’ll cover for you in the morning,” Hawkeye said. He poured himself the last of the still’s gin and knocked it back. BJ watched him: his pale throat, his calloused hand, his mussed hair, and the way his eyelashes caught the light.
“Can I ask you something?” BJ said.
“By all means,” Hawkeye said, voice rough, hand on his hip.
“What else did we do in Tokyo?” BJ said.